Search form

Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and is the Media Research Center’s Director of Media Analysis. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.

Graham is a regular talk-radio and television spokesman for the MRC and has made television appearances on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Fox Business Channel. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, National Review, and other publications.

Graham left the MRC to serve in 2001and 2002 as White House Correspondent for World, a national weekly Christian news magazine. He returned in 2003. Before joining the MRC, Graham served as press secretary for the campaign of U.S. Rep. Jack Buechner (R-Mo.) in 1988, and in 1987, he served as editor of Organization Trends, a monthly newsletter on philanthropy and politics by the Washington-based Capital Research Center.

On his PBS talk show on Tuesday, Tavis Smiley brought on liberal Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to discuss the Tucson shooting, but he was still reliving the much tinier, nonviolent nightmare of Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) yelling "You lie!" at President Obama during a September 2009 address to Congress to sell ObamaCare. He suggested it was the greatest moment of incivility in the history of the House of Representatives.

This would seem to be skipping incidents like Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely beating Sen. Charles Sumner with his cane over slavery in 1856. The History Channel says "Brooks became an instant hero in the South, and supporters sent him many replacement canes." (Or there's the Puerto Rican terrorists shooting up the place and wounding five House members in 1956...) But Smiley was adamant:

Clearly, no one was shot, nobody lost his or her life in this process, but it's hard to find a greater moment of incivility in the history of the House than when your colleague on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Wilson, stood up in the president's speech, President Obama's speech, and said, "You lie" for the nation and the world to hear. If ever there were a moment of incivility in our politics, it was that moment.

On the very same day that The Washington Post is shaming Sarah Palin on the front page for using the phrase "blood libel," the Post editorial page welcomed the shameless Rev. Al Sharpton to paint himself as a peacemaker in the post-Tucson political games. The headline was "Passion without poison." Nowhere in the article did the supposedly reformed Sharpton find the words to apologize for smearing innocent people with the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, something he's never apologized for. But the Post finds him worthy to deliver their sermon.

This may have been organized by Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart, one of the first on Wednesday to attack Sarah Palin on TV for using the words "blood libel" to describe the evidence-free charge that Palin and other conservatives were guilty for Jared Loughner's murderous rampage. On the Post website, Capehart honored Sharpton for his maturation:

On Tuesday night's Charlie Rose show on PBS, New Yorker editor (and former Washington Post reporter) David Remnick equated Team Obama's attempt to demonize and "freeze out" Fox News Channel with a campaign to create civil discourse. Demonizing equals civility?

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think that the president had an opportunity that he did not seize in order to make a real contribution to the civil discourse that we`re talking about and to exhibit those things that he spoke about and those things he believed in?

DAVID REMNICK: He was laughed out of court. Remember the attack on Fox News? I mean, it might not have been as smoothly done as one would have liked but there was an attempt by the Obama administration -- a very concerted attempt with Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, and even the president, to either freeze out or do a critique of the rhetoric of Fox News and whether, in fact, they're news at all and all the rest of the critique that you see elsewhere in the media. And it was laughed out of court by a lot of people.

As should seem obvious, the bloggers of the Daily Kos have been at the forefront of talking up how the "American Taliban" are to blame in Tucson. The blogger "lutznancy" summed up Kosmonaut History in a Tuesday post-mortem: "This started decades ago. And slowly but surely it has, like a slow-growing cancer, metastasized to point of sure death, the death of America, or to be more clear, America as a beacon of a functioning democracy in the world."

Thanks for toning down the rhetoric, Daily Kos!

To this blogger, the GOP is the Party of Fear Itself: "[W]hat do Republicans have to lose by stopping the practice of hate speech, vitriol, paranoid conspiracy theories, whipping up the fear? Elections, supporters and money. Power. The power to be elected to positions where they can change policies that affect them and their rich corporate sponsors. If they can whip up fear to the exclusion of critical thinking, they can win elections. They have no other way to do that...NONE."

This same blogger was one of the quickest Internet hounds to demand on Saturday afternoon the media report as "FACT" that Republicans kill Democrats:

On the late-night PBS talk show Charlie Rose on Monday night, the debate about who to blame for the Tucson shootings was a unanimously liberal media panel. NBC anchor Brian Williams and Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein tried to be careful, but recently departed Newsweek editor Jon Meacham wanted to push blame on “hot talk.” As Rose interviewed Williams (from a remote in Tucscon), Meacham jumped in to ask: “Brian, is it your sense that there was anything particular about the climate in Arizona, the political climate, that may have put fuel on the garage floor here?”

Williams claimed “I’m not equipped and haven’t seen enough evidence” to draw lines (although Andrea Mitchell played up the controversy for Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in a Monday night story). Ezra Klein said “it is very, very hard to draw any connections,” but Meacham was eager to assess blame, that in eras of liberal “change,” like the Sixties or the Obama era there’s more violence:

Back in 2006, PBS commentator Mark Shields suggested that the death of 12 coal miners in an accident in West Virginia was “Tom DeLay’s America in action.” The year before, as disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather stepped down, he said “The lynch mob won.” But on Monday night’s PBS NewsHour, Shields was the scold of “hate speech” for the shooting in Tucson. New York Times columnist David Brooks found the subject “completely not germane,” but Shields disagreed:

I think, Jim, that we have seen the deterioration of our public debate and the climate that has been fostered and nurtured by what could only be called hate speech. And I think that hate speech basically depersonalizes and demonizes political adversaries. You're not an adversary, not an opponent. You're an enemy.

And I think -- I don't know of a causal relationship here with this individual, but one should not be surprised that, when you do demonize to the degree that we have done in our politics and has been done, whether it's calling George Bush Hitler or calling Barack Obama Hitler, or saying as Glenn Beck did, that he knows he's a racist, something happens.

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander uncorked a surprising sentence in his Sunday column on his newspaper's terminology in immigration-policy stories:

A review of Post terminology in stories during the second half of 2010 shows that "undocumented immigrant" was used about six times more frequently than "illegal immigrant."

Most journalists use "illegal immigrant" despite pressure from Hispanic activists, both inside and outside the media. (They often avoid the term "illegal alien.") Alexander argued the Post "would be wise to join the discussion over the best vocabulary, even if it ended up reinforcing its current directives." He acknowledged that choosing terms can be choosing sides: "Those that abandoned 'illegal immigrant,' for example, surely would be accused of softening the jargon to favor advocates of less restrictive immigration laws."

Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi was complete enough in his reporting on the internal NPR review of the Juan Williams firing on Saturday that he included financial numbers that NPR released on the bonuses of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. The decision to cancel her bonus over that Fox-loathing fiasco was a six-figure decision:

According to tax records released by NPR on Friday, Schiller received a bonus of $112,500 in May 2010, about 17 months after she was hired by the Washington-based organization. This was in addition to a base salary of $450,000. The bonus was included in her hiring package, NPR said.

The preceding year, before Schiller's arrival, NPR paid out $1.22 million in salary, bonuses and deferred compensation to Schiller's predecessor, Kevin Klose, who retired that year. It paid another $1.22 million to Ken Stern, its president, who was forced out. Stern's compensation was swelled by a early buyout of his contract, according to NPR.

Within minutes of reporting the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other innocents in Tucson, as the early reports wrongly cited Giffords as dead, CNN found a local liberal cartoonist/columnist to suggest the violence was “inevitable” because local conservatives had been “stoking the fires of heater anger and rage.” When CNN anchor Martin Savidge pointed out there was no information yet on the shooter, the cartoonist acknowledged “That is correct,” and then added blame to the state's “fetish” for guns and repeated his attack on the “rabid right.”

The CNN anchor buttered him up by saying “We do appreciate your insights” even as he repeated there was no evidence. The liberal cartoonist was David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star:

MARTIN SAVIDGE: I want to turn to David Fitzsimmons who is with the "Arizona Daily Star," a political cartoonist. He is on the scene at Safeway. David, are you there?

Count National Organization for Women president Terry O'Neill as one leftist who will quickly and easily blame the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others on Saturday on GOP Members of Congress, and still unproven Tea Party racial slurs yelled at Rep. John Lewis and the withdrawn claims of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver that he was spat upon purposely. O'Neill's press statement began by blaming Sarah Palin:

NOW condemns the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) that stole six lives and seriously injured 12 today. We condemn, equally, the culture of hate and violence increasingly reflected in extreme right-wing opponents of those who support progressive solutions to our country's challenges.

Rep. Giffords, whose office was vandalized after she voted for the federal health care reform law last year, was also named on Sarah Palin's "Targeted" list. Giffords (who has been consistently endorsed by NOW's PAC) herself understood the not-so-well veiled threat, stating "the thing is that the way she [Palin] has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize that there are consequences to that action."

On Saturday, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi found that NPR insiders are furious at the forced resignation of Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news who so controversially canned Juan Williams. The liberal arrogance of NPR was on full display, that they were the future of "democracy," and Fox News was clearly the enemy of democracy and an independent press:

"We have allowed Fox News to define the debate," wrote Peter Block, a member of the board of Cincinnati Public Radio, in a posting to an e-mail group consisting of public radio managers. He added, "I do not think this kind of capitulation [by NPR] assures the future of an independent press....Democracy is on the line and NPR is one of the last bastions of its possibility."

Farhi added that NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, also pointed to Fox (less harshly) in her column, that the Williams "incident has become a partisan issue in Washington's hothouse atmosphere, with Republicans (egged on by Fox News) using it as a rallying cry to demand that NPR be 'defunded' by the federal government." Do conservatives need to be "egged on" about NPR's shameless actions?

On the morning before NPR announced its internal review of its leftist purge of Juan Williams for appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, media reporter David Folkenflik was "reporting" that the problem with the American news media is its painful lack of bias. Come again? "Mainstream news reporters don't tell you what they think enough of the time." That came from the star of the Folkenflik story, journalism professor Jay Rosen, a favorite of Bill Moyers. On the website, the story was headlined: "American Media's True Ideology? Avoiding One."

Anchor Steve Inskeep began: Yesterday on this program, we heard a story from London about the boisterous world of British newspapers and how they, unlike their American counterparts, openly embrace a point of view. Today, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik brings us an influential media critic who argues that mainstream American journalists do cling to their own ideology. It's not exactly on the right, not exactly on the left. He calls it the voice from nowhere."

It's not hard to imagine that Jay Rosen is "influential" in liberal media circles when he tells them they're not being liberal enough for him. Folkenflik set up his theory and his hopes and dreams for more bias:

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported on NPR’s internal review of the Juan Williams firing and the coinciding resignation of senior vice president Ellen Weiss on both Thursday’s night’s All Things Considered and Friday’s Morning Edition. Both stories were strictly limited to soundbites from NPR officials and in each story, one soundbite from Williams reacting on Fox News.

Perhaps due to this sterile, defensive soundbite list, NPR was slapping themselves on the wrists. Folkenflik said Weiss’s depature was a “startling fall,” but on Morning Edition, evening anchor Robert Siegel said “the logic was clear.”

"It doesn't surprise me that somebody was going to go, after the incredibly sloppy, messy and often embarrassing severance of Juan Williams," Siegel said. “I don’t think Ellen’s leaving is a measure of her work over the years. It was this one, very poorly handled [move].”

Just when conservatives think there's finally a little ideological balance in the Congress, the far-left diarists of the Daily Kos are convinced the country has dangerously shifted to the right, led by Obama, who's now a "hostage" to Republicans, and even MoveOn.org is too "moderate left" for them. The blogger Shutterbug thinks it's time to ponder the presidential psychosis:

If we accept that the ‘hostages’ Obama referred to when he justified the tax deal were indeed a section of the the American people, with the Oligarchs playing the role of hostage takers...

"She took the admission of my visceral fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as evidence that I am a bigot. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they are offended by my comments. She never suggested that I had discriminated against anyone. Instead she continued to ask me what did I mean and I told her I said what I meant. Then she said she did not sense remorse from me. I said I made an honest statement. She informed me that I had violated NPR's values for editorial commentary and she was terminating my contract as a news analyst."

Williams chose not to participate in the review (perhaps knowing his view of the firing was already quite public.) The idea that Weiss's departure is coincidental doesn't come across in the Board's findings:

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (a foreign editor and business editor of the Post in the 1990s) asked a bizarre question on the badly-named 'PostPartisan" blog: "Is Darrell Issa the new Joe McCarthy?" Clearly, the Post knows that when a liberal blurs you with McCarthy, they mean you are a life-wrecking, fact-mangling monster fueled by demons like ambition and alcohol. The headline is designed for web traffic, since the normally calm Ignatius concluded: "Issa doesn't come across as a McCarthyite." But Issa calling Team Obama "corrupt" was deeply upsetting to the Posties. Wrote Ignatius:

It was scary, frankly, to hear Issa describe the executive branch under President Obama as "one of the most corrupt administrations." What on earth was he talking about? This is an administration that has often tied itself in knots with petty ethical rules. Issa's comment bordered on demagogy.

When you see the righteous gleam in Issa's eye, recall other zealous congressional investigators who claimed to be doing the public's business but ended up pursuing vendettas. I think of Robert F. Kennedy's ruthless pursuit of labor "racketeering" when he was chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. And, more chilling, I think of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's use of that subcommittee to probe what he imagined was Communist Party subversion in America.

The top of the Washington Post website on Wednesday features this headline: "Dem: You shouldn't 'worship your Constitution.'" It links to an article on the top of the front page of the Style section emphasizing how Democrats worry the Tea Party and the Republicans have caused Democrats to "worry that the charter is being misconstrued as the immutable word of God" -- as if the Democrats' base believes in an immutable God. Reporter Jason Horowitz forwarded the panic of very liberal Rep. Jerrold Nadler of lower Manhattan (lifetime ACU score: 2.6 out of 100), presented as a "Talmudic" scholar of the text:

"They are reading it like a sacred text," said New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the outgoing chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, who has studied and memorized the Constitution with talmudic intensity.

Nadler called the "ritualistic reading" on the floor "total nonsense" and "propaganda" intended to claim the document for Republicans. "You read the Torah, you read the Bible, you build a worship service around it," said Nadler, who argued that the Founders were not "demigods" and that the document's need for amendments to abolish slavery and other injustices showed it was "highly imperfect."

The December 31 edition of PBS's Washington Week tried to spin the year 2010 in the most favorable way for Obama. First, Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty tried to suggest the massive Democratic losses in the House were somehow pretty conventional, yawn:

Well, I think it shook out as a pretty conventional midterm election. All year long, right up until Election Day, the Democrats kept telling us elections are really choices between two candidates and the Republicans kept saying no, this is going to be a referendum on the president. And that’s what midterms are for after presidential elections.They are often the American public kind of putting its foot on the brake just a bit.

A 63-seat loss for the Democrats? That's not so high a tidal wave. Then host Gwen Ifill suggested the electorate missed something. It was a better year for America and Obama than the voters thought:

The media’s coverage of the incoming GOP-controlled House of Representatives could be called the March of the Mean Words. When Democrats ascend to power, they pass “historic” and “landmark reforms.” When Republicans do the same, the media argot is colorful and violent, sending unsubtle meat-axe messages of conservative “assaults” and “attacks.” See an Associated Press dispatch on plans for an Obamacare-repeal vote. AP began:

The House's new Republican majority plans to vote to repeal Barack Obama's landmark health care overhaul before he even shows up in their chamber to give his State of the Union address....

Full repeal of the health care law is still a long shot. The House vote would be just the first, easiest step. But House Republicans vow they will follow up with dozens of attempts to hack away at what they derisively call "Obamacare."

The Hollywood Reporter was putty in the hands of left-wing "comedian" Kathy Griffin as she vowed to spend the new year attacking Sarah Palin's daughter in high school:

The comic set a resolution for 2011 -- taking on a new Palin in the new year. "I've already gone for Sarah, Todd and Bristol obviously," Griffin tells The Hollywood Reporter. "But I think it's Willow's year to go down."

Federal employees and military personnel can donate to the Media Research Center through the Combined Federal Campaign or CFC. To donate to the MRC, use CFC #12489. Visit the CFC website for more information about giving opportunities in your workplace.